If things go according to custom, I’ll spend about one third of my life asleep. So far I’m about on track.
Roughly speaking, though I’ve been alive on this planet for a little over 30 years, I’ve been unconscious, dead to the world, for about a decade. In human terms that is quite a long time, and if I reach 90 I’ll have spent the equivalent of my current total age in the world of the unconscious.
There are a lot of theories and studies about why we sleep, what happens when we sleep and what relation our sleeping life has to our conscious life, but I’m interested in a slightly more practical aspect of losing consciousness.
I think of sleep as a bodily demand much like hunger- it is a requirement that will drive an individual to extreme lengths and unexpected means. Much like a lack of food can force someone to consider or resort to cannibalism, lack of sleep can make someone attempt to sleep places that would otherwise be unthinkable.
Most people shun sleeping in cars or bars or under a highway overpass, but necessity is the mother of such actions and sleep will find always find a way into our daily lives. The demon of sleep rarely rests, always preparing to drag one out of the corporeal world and into the hallucinatory state of nightmares and dreams.
Sleeping in a home or hotel can offer a degree of comfort and predictability, but when we choose to or are forced to sleep elsewhere, it can be difficult to find any place where you won’t be disturbed, much less a comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed.
This experience of sleeping away from home, for those of us fortunate enough to have a home, is greatly determined by four factors: whether it is planned or unplanned, covered or uncovered, with bedclothes or without and of course whether the weather is tolerable or not.
While you have probably had a memorable planned night out that has turned into a disaster, it is the unplanned, uncovered, no-sleeping-bag, crappy weather night out that you will remember forever.
If you have not had at least one of these yet, you may consider yourself lucky, so far, but no one is free from the risk.
The worst night of sleep I have ever spent feels almost too much like a nightmare to have actually occurred.
First of all it was on a bus trip from New York to Great Falls, Montana. Hell to start with. On top of that I had just been dumped by a gorgeous woman who was already sleeping with someone else, I had missed my non-transferable return flight and I had already spent a torturous day and a half on various Greyhounds passing through Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, and so forth.
At one stop in Wisconsin the marquee at a hotel read, “My boss told me to change this sign, so I did.” It was a foreshadowing of the surreal night to come.
Night fell, and between trying to sleep I did my best to foster a smoking habit at each stop. Both attempts failed.
I had almost drifted off at about 1 a.m., when the driver pulled the bus into Fargo, North Dakota. He herded everybody off the bus and when asked when we would continue towards Montana he replied, “I don’t know.” Then he disappeared.
The two or three benches in the small Fargo bus station were already full, but the small group of guys who headed down the block to see if the porn shop was still open left much of the floor along the walls empty. I took a corner on the floor up against the soda machine and stared out of half-closed eyes.
Between the sleep-deprivation induced hallucinations, the nicotine fidgeting and the recently-dumped depression, Fargo became a lower level of Hell, inhumane torture- worse than Disneyland. Somewhere between the Rage Against the Machine on my headphones and the polyester-clad ladies on the bench across from me I lost consciousness. There were lines of people milling about in circles, shouts and explosions from outside, and zombies pressing up against the frosted glass windows.
I returned to consciousness in the morning twilight, passing out of Bismarck, with a sensation of disorientation, uncertain if the recent experience was real or not.
I have also resorted to sleeping outside in the January snow at 8,000 feet, in the dirt of a parking lot alongside Interstate 90 and on the Gulf Coast sand with nothing but my arm for a pillow. These types of experiences stand out much more boldly than a routine sleep.
Try as I might I can rarely drag the thoughts and experiences of the approximately 10,000 good nights of sleep that I have had out into this conscious world. They remain greatly autonomous, lost unto themselves. But I have found that the more uncomfortable or awful a period of shut-eye is, the larger a part of life it becomes and remains.
Where good comfortable sleep in a familiar bed disappears into non-existence, thousands of unmemorable nights falling into a void resembling premonitions of death, exotic or traumatic sleep remains alive, a piece of life that you can hold on to, speak about, carry, and share.
I look forward to the next terrible sleep, and to keeping another night of life alive in my memory.